What I Hear: Anthony Davis (NEC/BSO collaboration)

For this spring’s "What I Hear" event, American composer Anthony Davis curates a program of chamber music in connection with the BSO's performance of his You Have the Right to Remain Silent, Anthony McGill clarinet soloist, later that evening. 

New England Conservatory musicians perform his works Middle Passage, Still Waters III and They Wanted a Girl  (from Amistad) along with Alvin Singleton's Be Natural.  BSO Artistic Administrator Eric Valliere moderates a conversation with the composer.

Anthony Davis

As a composer, Davis is best known for his operas. X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X, which played to sold-out houses at its premiere at the New York City Opera in 1986, was the first of a new American genre: opera on a contemporary political subject. A new production of a revised version was launched in May 2022 at Detroit Opera and directed by Robert O'Hara. The premiere recording of X was released on the Gramavision label in August 1992 and received a Grammy Nomination for "Best Contemporary Classical Composition" in February 1993. A new recording with BMOP and Odyssey Opera was released in October 2022. Davis won a Pulitzer Prize for his recent opera, The Central Park Five. Davis's second opera, Under the Double Moon, a science fiction opera with an original libretto by Deborah Atherton, premiered at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis in June 1989. His third opera, Tania, with a libretto by Michael-John LaChiusa and based on the abduction of Patricia Hearst, premiered at the American Music Theater Festival in June 1992. A recording of Tania was released in 2001 on Koch, and in November 2003, Musikwerkstaat Wien presented its European premiere. A fourth opera, Amistad, about a shipboard uprising by slaves and their subsequent trial, premiered at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in November 1997. Set to a libretto by poet Thulani Davis, the librettist of X, Amistad was staged by George C. Wolfe